CVS + PayPal My Cash Cards Seem to Have Died Overnight

PayPay My Cash cards purchased with a credit card have been a nice little manufactured spend machine for several years. Buy $500 cards for $3.95 fee, load ’em up $500 per day / $4,000 per month to a PayPal account.

Withdrawing the money to bank accounts was a quick route to PayPal shutdowns. Instead, pairing it with the PayPal Business Debit MasterCard worked for services such as bill pay with Plastiq or RadPad allowed use of credit cards for bills that might not otherwise accept them or impose high fees.

Dead Overnight

Points, Miles & Martinis popped up today to say he had been denied sale at a CVS register this morning (he has subsequently posted to collect data points). Register had a ‘not authorized’ error message. The day prior the transaction was smooth.

Another report has surfaced on FlyerTalk with the same experience. Both have called the number on the back of the card and been told CVS ended sale of My Cash Cards overnight.

More data points will soon follow. I expect them to corroborate. Many stores have not been restocking the cards for the past several months. My recent efforts in vain to locate the cards in Seattle area stores produced claims from store managers that CVS was about to end sale of these cards.

I am not aware of any other merchants that allow purchase of My Cash cards using credit cards.

Is this the End for CVS?

I think this action by CVS is limited to PayPal My Cash cards specifically, not other gift cards. Over the past year there have been reports of hacking of these cards. The only security feature is a 9-digit scratch off pin. Each time I buy them I worry I am going to get hit with a fraud issue, such as a phony pin or pin already redeemed.

I won’t take it as indicative of a wider policy change by CVS. One Vanilla Reloads died, that, too was a targeted action.

There is a difference between store policy and hard coding of the registers. I bought all three of those types of cards at CVS stores in the past could weeks in NJ, NY, MN and WA. What is being reported on PayPal is that overnight the registers were hard-coded so they cannot be sold at all, regardless of payment method.

I wish I had known that a year ago! When PayPal launched reloads they only announced 3 retailers, I tried CVS at the time, didn’t work, and I didn’t hear anything subsequent or think to keep trying. Now that you have me hunting around, I see conflicting reports of what worked at CVS was a true reload or a repurchase of the card, if it was a repurchase in the system, presumably that no longer works. Please report back if you are able to reload. I won’t be in a position to test myself until next week.

Alright dude you run a great blog and all but no offense, knowing that PPMC can be reloaded at CVS is basic information at this point…I don’t know why people “hunt” for these cards when all you need are 4-5 reusable ones to keep it going. Better for the environment, too!

I wish I had known. They didn’t work when reloads were first launched at other retailers that didn’t take credit card cards and my fault for not periodically retrying them. We get into our routines and a good reminder for me to periodically try to break out of them. I don’t think it was talked about much when they did start working, though I don’t spend my days on MS forums. The downside of the reloads of course is the number of trips since only one per day per PayPal account. I would have been making 16 trips a month.

CVS accepts for OneVanila (the $4.95 ones not MyVanilla) and PPMC. I just purchased some OneVanilla VGC at various CVS’s in the San Gabriel Valley the past few weeks. I agree with Stefan PPMC has been out of commission for some time. I knew you could reload PPMC but never tried. Has anyone tried to reload an existing PPMC at CVS?

[…] ending devaluation/deal killing phase of this sinking hobby, lets have a moment of silence for the CVS + PayPal My Cash Cards deal (routed through that Business card one). Death was sudden it appears. Pay Pal is a brutal company to do business with in […]

but you can still go to SM Place (Macerich) to buy fee free vgc by Sunrise Bank! Note there are other Macerich malls in So Cal, but check to see if they will be selling gc during the weekend. Westside Pavilion sells cards out of management office which is closed on weekends SM Place has a kiosk and the promo runs thru Sunday (inclusive).

we are going to unload at wm when we go back home–we are also just in LA for the week. Comments on post at DOC indicate they can be unloaded for mo at wm. pin is last 4. Worth taking the chance for us.

I just spoke to PayPal customer service, and they’ve ceased selling new cards. Forever, anywhere. You can use a previously used card at 3 retailers (if the retailer wants to), Dollar General and 2 others I’d never heard of. You can do this for another year, and after that, the service is ended.

About Stefan

Stefan Krasowski has traveled to 189 countries and is an expert on international travel, frequent flyer programs, and travel credit cards. More About Stefan»

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